Seventeen EU leaders have urged Taoiseach Micheál Martin, president-in-office of the Council of the European Union, to protect agriculture and cohesion funding in the bloc’s next long-term budget. Their letter arrived ahead of a revision of the Negotiating Box, the presidency’s document for steering and narrowing the talks. The Brussels apparatus is deciding which priorities receive money—and which claims on the shared budget must compete.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Romanian President Nicușor Dan signed first. Bulgaria, Cyprus, Croatia, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Hungary also signed. Negotiations on the 2028–2034 Multiannual Financial Framework have entered what the letter calls a decisive phase.
The budget’s competing priorities
The leaders asked the presidency to maintain funding for agriculture and cohesion policy as the EU takes on new priorities. Their letter said the bloc faces “an evolving strategic environment” and listed security and defence, competitiveness, connectivity, energy security and resilience as areas requiring joint action. But they argued those demands shouldn’t come at the expense of policies grounded in the treaties.
“Therefore, the overall volume set out in the Negotiating Box of the Cypriot presidency remains the relevant basis for dealing effectively with all these financing needs. This is not the time for Europe to lower its ambitions,” the leaders wrote. The language is expansive; the budget has limits. Member-state governments are negotiating how to divide public resources among an increasingly crowded list of priorities.
The signatories said cohesion policy and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) support convergence among member states and regions, rural and less developed areas, competitiveness and food security. They also said these policies strengthen the single market and provide tangible support to millions of European citizens. The leaders made that case for protecting the funding as governments reconsider the budget’s structure.
“We therefore believe that overall funding for cohesion policy and the CAP should be preserved in the next MFF,” they wrote.
Cuts, revenue and repayment
The leaders said the European Commission’s proposal already means real-terms cuts to cohesion and farm funding, even with an overall increase in the size of the MFF. They warned that another reduction would weaken the budget and risk undermining public support for the European project. Their letter also rejects the claim that another cut would modernise the system, arguing that the proposed MFF already brings a fundamental transformation in structure, programming and spending.
They say new EU priorities need appropriate additional resources, while agriculture and cohesion funding stay protected. To find money, the signatories are prepared to discuss revenue proposals, including new own resources meant to ease direct pressure on national budgets. Any new resources, they said, should be “genuine, fair, simple and non-regressive,” consistent with a May declaration. They also said they would assess adjustments the Commission had committed to present.
The leaders proposed considering more gradual repayment of NextGenerationEU to create additional fiscal space in the next MFF. That proposal depends on assessing its effect on the overall repayment cost. They also raised limited, targeted European debt instruments for clearly identified strategic priorities. The letter offers no blank cheque: it ties both proposals to conditions and leaves final choices to the negotiations.
The signatories said national rebates should have no place in the next MFF because the circumstances that had justified corrections to some member states’ contributions had fundamentally changed. They want assessments to consider both the absolute level of national contributions and each country’s relative prosperity and contribution effort. They remain open to working with the Council presidency. The people affected by the eventual allocations aren’t writing the Negotiating Box; governments are bargaining over the figures on their behalf.